PM360 introduces you to the people who invest in and help startups succeed, in this case: Mary Schaheen, President and Director of Prevail Partners LLC.
Affiliations: Prevail Partners LLC is affiliated with Prevail InfoWorks, Inc., an industry leader in providing early observations and understanding of clinical trial endpoints through real-time data aggregation, advanced analytics and visualizations.
Partner Portfolio: In the past 10 years, Prevail Partners has invested in over 50 life science companies. Most of these companies have been therapeutic companies but also some medical device and diagnostic companies.
“We have been fortunate to have partnered with many excellent companies that have generated licensing deals with payments exceeding well over $3 billion, and five companies completed successful IPOs on the NASDAQ in the last few years. Therapeutic areas of our current portfolio companies include CNS, oncology, regenerative medicine, bioactive materials, and nephrology, to name a few.”
Investment Strategy: Prevail Partners targets its investments to help its portfolio companies fund a portion of their clinical trials, usually between 10%-20% of the costs. While there is no restriction on the use of funds invested, the level of investment is based on the funding needed for the clinical trials, with Phase 1 studies obviously needing less funding than later stage studies.
What She Looks for in Startups: Mary and her team invest in clinical-stage life sciences companies with promising investigational products that should experience a value inflection if it is successfully advanced in a clinical trial. Prevail Partners recognizes that clinical trial data is one of the most, if not the most, valuable assets of a clinical stage life sciences company since it creates opportunities for fundraising, out-licensing, going public, and other forms of monetization.
“Therefore, leveraging the expertise and tools of our affiliate Prevail InfoWorks, we focus on helping our portfolio companies gain immediate insights from their clinical and operational data in order to more proactively manage the trial to a successful outcome.”
Reaching Goals: “We help our startups align their clinical trial with their corporate objectives. As an example, we had a company in the CNS space starting their first significant study, a 32-patient Phase 1b/2a. Their clinical objective was to start the study in January and present topline interim data at an important scientific conference in early November. Just as importantly, they wanted to up-list from being an over-the-counter public company to a NASDAQ-listed company. We worked with them to make sure they had good news flow based on the data in the study, so the CEO had something new to report at each investor conference in order to seed interest in their up-listing. We also worked with them to make sure the trial database was locked the same day as the last interim patient visit so that the CEO could present the data seven days later at the conference they were targeting. The result of all of this was that the company was able to up-list to the NASDAQ and increase their market cap from $15M to over $450M in 11 months.”
